Questions every practice owner asks.

Yes. The base tool — creating a pricebook, publishing a CMA-compliant price list, embedding it on your website, keeping it current — is free forever. No subscription, no trial countdown, no “upgrade to publish” nag. The thing that keeps you on the right side of the CMA Order stays free.

We’re giving back to the veterinary community that helped us get here. Pricebook.vet started as a tool for one young independent practice, with input from many more along the way. Keeping the base tool free is how we say thank you, and how we make sure every practice — especially small independents — gets it without paying tax on a regulator’s mandate.

Not for the base tool. If we ever ship optional paid add-ons they’ll be clearly priced and clearly optional. The base CMA-compliance product is and will remain free, and you won’t see surprise charges.

There isn’t one. The free version is the whole product: every feature you need to stay compliant and look good on your own website is in. No subscription, no rate-limited features nudging you toward an upgrade, no “contact sales” wall hiding a headline capability. If we ever ship optional paid add-ons they’ll sit on their own surface, clearly priced, with the base CMA-compliance tool untouched.

We render your published price list inside your website via the embed widget, and we use anonymised analytics from that widget (page views, no PII) so you can see how often clients are reading the page. The point of the CMA Order is to make your pricing public and it will consequently be used by 3rd party search engines, comparison sites, AI models etc. In the future we might use your data to build adjacent products; if we ever do, we will only use the data that is publically available on the internet.

Once you publish, your prices are public — that’s the design of the CMA Order. They’re visible to anyone, including other practices. What stays private is everything you haven’t chosen to publish: your dashboard, your drafts, your branch-level working notes, your client information, and any unpublished work.

Yes. There’s an export button in the dashboard that ships you a JSON archive of everything tied to your practice account: every price list version, every publish event, every embed analytics row. You can also request a full GDPR Subject Access Request through the contact page if you want a human to walk you through it.

No. Never. Drafts, work-in-progress, internal notes, and anything you haven’t hit publish on are invisible to anything outside your own dashboard. Only the prices you choose to publish leave the building, and we say so in the terms rather than the small print.

Yes. From the dashboard you can unpublish, archive, or fully delete any price list. Account deletion removes all live data; we keep versioned snapshots only as long as we’re required to under the CMA’s record-keeping rules, and then they go too.

Pricebook.vet covers the published price-list side of the Order — the mandated categories, ownership disclosure, terms summary, versioned snapshots, and the structured data search engines and aggregators expect. It can’t make you compliant on the bits that happen off the website (e.g. how your front desk quotes a procedure on the phone). We map every Pricebook.vet feature to the relevant Order article on the compliance page so you can see exactly what’s covered.

We update the product. The CMA has signalled it’ll review the Order in 2028, and we’d expect smaller revisions before then. If a mandated category or disclosure changes, we’ll change the templates and the readiness check, and email every practice with a one-line summary of what to do. You won’t need to rebuild your list — that’s our job.

No. Two alternatives: link out to your hosted pricebook page (we provide a clean URL on your custom subdomain), or export the structured data and render it yourself. The embed is the easiest path for most practices because it stays current automatically when you publish, but it’s a choice, not a requirement.

Each branch gets its own price list, its own embed, and its own public page — because the CMA wants branch-level pricing where it varies. You can share a category structure across branches and override individual prices per site, so you’re not maintaining ten parallel lists by hand. Group-level disclosure (parent group, ultimate owner) is set once and applied everywhere.

It depends on your corporate structure. The CMA Orders bind in three waves: September 2026 for the Orders themselves taking legal effect, December 2026 for large corporate groups, and March 2027 for small independents. If your practice is owned by a corporate group that falls under the CMA’s market investigation, you should plan for December 2026. If you’re an independent, March 2027 is your date. Either way, starting early means less rush.

Yes. Pricebook.vet embeds into any website with a single script tag — no rebuild, no CMS migration, no design changes. The widget matches your site’s look through the theme editor. If you’d rather not embed, you can link to a hosted pricebook page on your own subdomain instead.

Whenever they change. The CMA Order doesn’t set a schedule, but the published price has to reflect what you actually charge. In practice, most practices update a few times a year. Pricebook.vet makes each update a short job: edit the number, hit publish, and the live widget updates in seconds.

We keep Pricebook.vet aligned with the CMA rules as they evolve — mandated categories, required disclosures, new Remedies, the lot. When the Order updates, the tool updates; your published price list stays compliant; you don’t have to track every amendment. Busy veterinary professionals can keep their attention where it belongs: on clients and clinical outcomes, not on regulatory admin.

The CMA’s enforcement powers take effect from September 2026. They can issue directions requiring compliance within a set period. If a practice still doesn’t comply, the CMA can apply to court for an enforcement order, and breaching that order can lead to fines. The RCVS may also treat non-compliance as a professional conduct matter. The short version: it’s not optional, and the consequences escalate.

A pricebook is the unit you create inside Pricebook.vet. It’s everything a pet owner needs to make sense of your prices in one place — the price list itself, the embeddable widget that drops into your website, and any pet care plans you offer alongside it. Most practices run one pricebook per practice. If you have different brands or branches with their own tariffs, you can run several pricebooks under a single account and publish each one to its own page or subdomain.

Sign up at app.pricebook.vet, claim your practice, and you land on a dashboard pre-seeded with the seven CMA-mandated categories. Fill in your numbers, hit publish, copy the embed snippet into your website. That’s the path — no implementation call required.

For a standard first-opinion practice with one branch, an afternoon. The mandated categories are pre-built; the longest part is gathering the numbers from your PMS and deciding how to present any “from £X” prices. Multi-branch groups take longer in proportion to the number of branches, mostly because someone has to confirm each branch’s tariff.

CSV import is in flight (tracked under issue #216) and we’d expect it shipped before the December 2026 deadline rush. Until then you can paste rows in via a bulk-add UI, which is faster than it sounds because the categories and column headers are fixed. If you have an unusual export format, send it to us via the contact page and we’ll sanity-check it works.

One read-only feed today: a JSON-LD payload at the embed URL — the same data the widget renders, so you can consume it yourself if you’d rather not use the embed. A full read/write practice API isn’t public yet — if you have a use case (PMS sync, in-house dashboard), tell us via the contact page and we’ll factor it into the roadmap.

The contact page goes straight to the team — no ticket bot, no tier-one outsourcing. We aim to reply within one working day. Urgent compliance questions get fast-tracked.